The field of the disclosure relates generally to methods and systems for fabricating components, and more specifically, to cutting component patterns from a composite material.
At least some known components are fabricated by stacking multiple layers of pre-cut material patterns on top of one another and then curing the material layers together using a resin and various heat treatments. A template of the component is projected onto a sheet of composite material from which the patterns are cut by a metal blade. However, the metal blades become dull relatively quickly and require frequent replacement, which is expensive and leads to a significant amount of machine down-time. Additionally, when the blades are dull, they may not complete the cut to entirely separate the component from the sheet of material. When an operator attempts to remove a component that is not entirely separated from the sheet, the operator may pull the sheet of material offline and compromise the component patterns being cut upstream from the removal site. In such a situation, the sheet of material is advanced to restart the patterns and the unfinished patterns are discarded. Furthermore, at least some known cutting systems are unable to cut the component patterns to the exact size required and, therefore, the size of the components cut from the sheet of material may be larger than a final desired component size. As such, an operator subsequently trims the oversize component manually to achieve the final desired component size. Accordingly, at least some known component pattern cutting systems generate an unacceptable amount of waste and are labor intensive, thus making them expensive to operate.